Yay for aluminum bikes!They've been a particular passion of mine since middle school.(disclaimer, I'm the Spooky guy)

FTW(aka Frank The Welder, AKA one of the godfathers of aluminum frame building, and the guy who makes the bikes here at Spooky) is doing an aluminum frame building clinic next weekend for experienced professional frame builders. There are currently 8 people registered as far as I know.Don't be surprised if you see new custom aluminum frames from Geekhouse and Zacanoto , among other new players, pretty soon. Aluminum bikes take practice for people who've only been building in steel or ti, but it's just a new process to learn, not anything super difficult.

I've been trying as hard as possible to make new aluminum tubing available to builders here in the US. I've sent tube drawings to both of the major tube distributors(a mtb kits for one distro, road for the other) and we've helped to re-tool the old Cannondale tubing factory in CT. The new folks running that place will be dusting off some of the better Caad bike dies(they have tooling up to CAAD8) as well as making some new custom dies for larger o.d tubes and oversized stays for us. The factory will be able to shape and draw tubes to the specification for each builder in batches as small as 10 tubes. That's going to be an amazing resource for people who want to make race bikes in the USA.We're also working to make sure that there is a good selection of stock headtubes, bb shells and dropouts available from those distributors.Materials availability is piss poor right now. When I can't get tubes from CT I end up specing tubing that I order from 5 different places on 2 continents, so inefficient.

Right now I can leave my house in the morning, go to the tube factory in CT and have Frank welding on proto stuff by 3 in the afternoon the same day. It's yet to be seen if that factory will be able to find the working capital to get off the ground but if they do it will allow US builders to build frames that really are without a doubt the best in the world.I like that a lot.

We stopped making production bikes- the economics just didn't work, especially since I'm not particularly good at running a business and we have been and still are massively under-capitalized. Our custom bikes cost twice as much as our old production bike, and our leadtimes are unpredictable, and at times my communication is spotty, and sometimes I go crazy and lose weeks of work, but man, when people finally get their beastly bikes they really seem to like them...

here's some candy/big batch of spam of some recent custom cross/road bikes:

Aluminum is back in a big way, and it's going to be better than ever!

If you guys have any questions about aluminum stuff let me know and I'll do my best to answer them.

Custom stuff looks great so kudos. Are you doing any mountain bike work too?

Cheers

Rob

Heck yeah!Our MTB frames won a total of 13 pro races last year.We've racked up 5 national championships in Cat1 over the last 4 years, 6 state championships, 4 district BMX titles and 4 regional collegiate titiles and 3 national collegiate titles.

For next year we are fielding a pretty badass development team- full-on professional coaching for every rider, PHD sport scientists and nutritionists, european CX and road racing on the national team for our 2 U23's, etc. I want to win more domestic pro mtb races than any other company in 2015- developing our own talent is key to that.

here's some recent cool mtb stuff:

Fat bike for Trek employee

Tammy Jacques Grewal, 15x US national MTB team member

Jeremy Powers

29'r for u23 road pro based out of Indiana

SS XC race bike for one of my U23's(tubulars on his SS, because that's how we roll!)

dh race bike for UK-based female DH pro.

Slalom bike for US national #4 female gravity pro

650b for a wicked cool guy in the UK

650b for a Costa Rica based pro

heck, sometimes I even get to ride bikes!

The majority of our MTB frames go to industry employees and elite racers in the USA and super swell customers in Europe.

Nearly half of our work is Yeti restorations of bikes that FTW designed like this Yeti ARC ASIt's in for a new headtube.

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